Teradata empowers customers with new analytics, new data, and new languages

SAN DIEGO, Sept. 18, 2013 — (PRNewswire) —  Teradata (NYSE: TDC), the leading analytic data solutions company, announced it is the first to offer next-generation, in-database R Analytics that are fully parallel and scalable. Customers can integrate the analytic libraries into Teradata's flexible analytic ecosystem to achieve game-changing business results. In addition, Teradata now provides the largest, most complete analytic library of over 1,000 in-database analytics, enhanced access to native Extensible Markup Language (XML) data, streamlined temporal analytics, and capabilities that make geospatial data faster and easier to use.

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"In-database analytics is no longer an emerging trend, but now an absolute requirement to meet the processing speed and data volume demands of the business," said Scott Gnau, president, Teradata Labs. "Through integrating multiple analytic techniques in the database, Teradata empowers its customers to push beyond the traditional limits of analytics by bringing the analytics to the data."

"The growing focus on big data and business analytics solutions as a basis for competitive advantage is both an opportunity and a challenge for most organizations. The promise of better and faster data-driven decision-making has pushed this technology to the top of executive agendas. In this environment, it is not only access to information, but the ability to analyze and act upon it in a timely manner that creates competitive advantage," said Dan Vesset, program vice president, IDC's Business Analytics Solutions, from the IDC Market Analysis: Worldwide Business Analytics Software 2013–2017 Forecast and 2012 Vendor Shares.

To respond to customers' challenges, Teradata opened its database to Revolution Analytics and Fuzzy Logix, and added enhanced database capabilities for XML data analysis, accelerated performance with geospatial data, and extended temporal analytics. These innovations support the next-generation Teradata^® Unified Data Architecture™, which enables customers to deploy, support, manage, and seamlessly access all their data in an integrated and dynamic environment.

"We continue to push the envelope of what is possible in a database environment. The tools we are offering the analytics professionals within our customer base provide them with the ability to create more analytics against more data, with a faster turnaround time. That is a competitive advantage that our customers want," said Bill Franks, chief analytics officer, Teradata.

Revolution R Analytics
R is an open source statistical language and software that is quickly becoming a tool of choice for data scientists. According to a KD Nuggets survey that measured the popularity of various programming languages, the number of data miners using R is growing; 61 percent of data miners who responded to the survey reported that they now use it. In response to customer demand, Teradata and Revolution Analytics are the first to bring parallel R into the database. Unlike other in-database implementations, Teradata tackled the complexity of running R analytics in parallel and made it accessible to even more users. The onus of parallel programming is no longer on the R programmer, but automatically processed by Revolution Analytics and Teradata. This collaboration makes Teradata performance and capacity accessible to all R programmers so they can derive meaning from large sets of critical data in record time. Running Revolution R Enterprise with ScaleR in parallel in the Teradata Database results in higher performance, greater scalability, and reliability.

The in-database R model can be applied against the entire customer population to deliver deeper and embedded intelligence. For instance, insights from the R programs can be incorporated into customer segmentation and target marketing applications in the Teradata Database.

"We are proud to partner with Teradata to offer joint customers the first in-database parallel R platform," said David Rich, chief executive officer, Revolution Analytics. "With over two million users worldwide, the R language is today's standard for powerful predictive analytics. Combined with the Teradata Database, Revolution R Enterprise's scalable, supported R technology enables users to innovate to meet the demands of data-driven businesses."

Fuzzy Logix Library
Teradata now offers customers the largest library of more than 600 Fuzzy Logix in-database analytics to complement the existing in-database Teradata capabilities, creating more than 1,000 analytics in total. These analytics can easily be accessed with the programing language of business - structured query language (SQL). Fuzzy Logix's embedded libraries of advanced analytics and predictive algorithms execute in parallel and greatly reduce the need for data movement. This provides for enormous processing efficiencies and a dramatic reduction in analytics cycle time. Bringing the analytics to the data allows analysts and data modelers to iterate in less time, spurring more creative analysis on full data sets and more accurate results. Fuzzy Logix, running in the Teradata data warehouse, makes it easy for organizations to embed the analytics into their business processes and enterprise applications.

Fuzzy Logix in-database capabilities, combined with Teradata, provide a scalable solution that makes it possible to accurately predict many types of future outcomes. For example, it is now possible to predict the likelihood of a patient developing a chronic disease. A healthcare provider or payer can now analyze billions of records across thousands of variables and the results can be used to prevent the occurrence of the disease.

"We have significantly expanded the depth and breadth of analytic functions to provide Teradata customers greater choice for scalable in-database analytics," said Partha Sen, chief executive officer, Fuzzy Logix. "Our joint development efforts with Teradata have created a solution that supports organizations' needs to analyze any volume of data, including the largest data sets. We can perform complex computations in real-time for risk management, high frequency trading, fraud identification, drug discovery, churn reduction, and online advertising."

Geospatial Data and Location Analysis
Teradata transformed a manual, computationally intense location analysis process and automated it with a new spatial indexing technique. The geospatial capability adds yet another data dimension to enhance the ability of organizations to understand their business. The use of geospatial data is commonplace, for example, by utility companies to quickly identify and respond to outages.  

Customers are able to reap the real benefits of processing geospatial data along with other business data. The geospatial capability adds yet another data dimension to enhance the ability of organizations to understand their business. Utility companies can quickly identify and respond to outages by tracking the location of available employees, parts, and equipment. Property and Casualty Insurers can better develop storm damage projections when the location data about the path of an on-coming storm is evaluated along with customer data.

XML Data Types
Teradata now enhances the ability to analyze data formatted in XML, an open-standards language, along with other business data within the Teradata Database. Teradata offers users a simpler, faster, and more direct option to transfer and decipher data in XML format. XML is used by businesses to transfer product information, transactions, inventory data, and other business information.

In Capital Markets, deals are struck and the data is stored in a dozen or more independent computer systems. The disparate systems may store data covering different financial instruments, like equities, derivatives, bonds, and foreign exchange, across different geographies and currencies. When the complex data about these transactions is created in XML it can easily be loaded into a Teradata Database to be reconciled. Then, it can be analysed along with other business data to determine risk profile and potential revenue to the institution.

"We are impressed with the Teradata Database 14.10 – the expansion of the number of analytic functions and enhanced Extensible Markup Language (XML) data access are great," said Jason Laws, chief architect, WhereScape. "The enhanced Teradata Database is compatible with WhereScape's highly-integrated development environment (IDE) for speedy data warehouse deployment."

Temporal Analytics
Teradata is the first vendor to pioneer the use of Temporal analytics, which allows customers to create a full picture of an organization's business at any point in time. Teradata added three new built-in capabilities that streamline, reduce complexity, and simplify the use of Temporal analytics. Temporal analytics enables organizations to capture and track changes as the business evolves over time. For example, Temporal analytics provided a major retailer with detailed insight into business operations. Business users across marketing, merchandising, and operations can ensure that shoppers are able to buy the merchandise they want, when they want it. Teradata Temporal automatically manages pricing and product availability dates and history, as the data is loaded. It decreases the time to get the thousands of products from suppliers to the shelves by eliminating the lengthy, in-house, post-processing methods. Teradata Temporal systemically manages the time-related aspects of merchandising, with the Teradata Database doing the work.